Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America

Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America
Fr. Josiah Trenham

Keynote Address

The Very Reverend Josiah Trenham, Ph.D.
Diocesan Parish Life Conference in El Paso, TX - June 15th, 2006
Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of America
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Your Grace, Basil, Bishop of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America; my dear brothers in the sacred priesthood; pious and Christ-loving Deacons; brothers and sisters in Christ:

I greet you with sincere affection in our common Savior, and bring the greetings of His Grace, Joseph, Bishop of Los Angeles and the West to all of you. I am greatly honored to be here in El Paso at the 2nd Parish Life Conference of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. I have the opportunity to speak to you on a subject most dear to my heart, and I believe to yours also: the unity of the Orthodox Church in America. I have entitled my presentation, "Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America", but before I begin please allow me to ask your forgiveness ahead of time for my mistakes and inadequacies, and to beg your indulgence. I do not speak from any position of expertise or authority on this subject, but as a concerned priest of the Church grasping for a way forward.

Psalm 132 and the Unity of Israel

"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head, coming down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard, coming down upon the edge of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, coming down upon the mountains of Zion; for there the Lord commanded the blessing- life forevermore." Psalm 132:1-3

Brothers are meant to dwell together in unity. That is the good life. That is the pleasant life. When men dwell in unity, they are invigorated with strength, and find their union producing immense fruits, exponentially greater collectively than the sum of what they could have produced as separated individuals. The union of all men, for which we pray in every divine service, is the will of God. All men united in Jesus Christ is the desire of the Lord. All earthly races united in the one heavenly race- which is the race of the New Adam, Jesus Christ, the Christian race, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. This union of all men in the Holy Church is the will of God from all eternity and the purpose of the Almighty, which animates all of His redemptive acts. As a witness and demonstrable expression of the life of the renewed humans, who are Christians, is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The Church is a miracle of unity for it is the New Man, and as such is the only miracle of unity in the cosmos. In confronting the Church all men are to witness a living organism that defies and transcends human divisions. Sadly today, when most outsiders encounter the Church and hear we are Orthodox Christians, a question immediately follows, "Are you Greek? Are you Russian?" and so by our divisions we have fostered an earthly identification of ethnicity and nationalism that leads the observer to conclude our Church is designed only for particular groups of people, and not for them.

When the holy Church is divided the prescriptive will of God is negated, the light of the holy Gospel itself is eclipsed, and the truth of the Lord is suppressed by man's unrighteousness. Misdirected men, in their lack of proper priorities, hold down the unity of the Church only with great effort, like compressing a great and mighty spring. The unity of the Church, like a powerful spring, is always ready to leap forth, and even when compressed and smothered by men's sins and indifference, this unity resists its suppressors. This is why division cannot last in the Church. It is like a cankerous sore to which the Body dispatches antibodies, and will not ignore until it is healed. Against this power of self-correction lie those who, at least by their actions, would like to make cankerous sores permanent fixtures of the body.

"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!" Unity is life. Division is death. We might recite the antithesis of Ps. 132 in these words,

Behold how evil and miserable it is for brothers to dwell in division! It is like a sulphuric stench in the nostrils, coming down upon the eyes. It is like the odor of Babylon, coming down upon the parched plains of Sodom; for there the Lord commanded the curse- everlasting death.

Such is the glory of unity, and such is the horror of division. Sadly today such Davidic opinions of the value of brotherly unity appear to be shared by too few. Brotherly unity is esteemed little, and placed beneath many other pseudo-priorities such as the status quo, power, property, ethnic affinities, and national loyalties.

Psalm 132 is one of fifteen Psalms of Ascent, chanted by the people of God as they made their way to the central sanctuary in Jerusalem to celebrate the feasts of the Lord. The chanting was of a tangible unity expressed not just in faith, but also in the deeds of a common worship and a common pilgrimage. Can you imagine this hymn being chanted by the pilgrims in any meaningful way if when the pilgrims arrived in Jerusalem they were divided by their 12 tribes, and each tribe was made to go its own different way, to its own different temple, presided over by its own different high priest, sitting in different places for the feast and never experiencing tangible unity?

The thought is ludicrous and grotesque, but has many parallels to contemporary Orthodox Christian life in America. Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to apply Psalm 132 to our present ecclesiastical miseries in America. We do not presently know the blessings of the unity described by Psalm 132. We do not enjoy the unity for which our Savior shed His precious blood. We do not experience the unity inspired by His Holy Spirit, established by His Holy Apostles, required by the Sacred Canons, and defended by the Holy Fathers. We have a measure of unity- for sure, but incomplete, mangled, and intolerable. We call the unity we possess by various names - a unity of faith sometimes we say, or a eucharistic unity. Some clergy even suggest that the only unity that matters is that various Orthodox in America can commune together. But this compromised and deficient unity does not satisfy our Savior, and is positively dangerous, threatening by its very inconstancy and instability to shatter the unity of faith and chalice that we do have. Orthodox Christians have never imagined historically that a unity of faith or communion could co-exist with a disunity of synod, praxis, and interchange. Two Sundays past we celebrated the Sunday of the Holy and God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicea. We celebrated a common Orthodox faith defended and confessed by a common Orthodox synod. In our present experience we have only half of the equation. We share a common Orthodox faith with our fellow Orthodox Christians throughout America, but we have no common synod. As a result nothing is defended or confessed as it should be, and we are weaklings in the face of encroaching secularism and heresy. Without a common synod we are sitting ducks to lose even our unity of faith.

The Trivialization of Disunity

We trivialize our disunity but calling it simply a disunity of jurisdictions or an administrative division -- as though the division we sustain is not a matter of the heart or essence or faith of the Orthodox Church. Jurisdiction and administration ring in our ears as merely external and relatively unimportant divisions, and so the tragedy of our division is belittled. As though our present divisions are merely the unfortunate turns of history, which we must benignly endure until they naturally go away. I beg to differ from such an appraisal. Such tamed and pacified descriptions of Orthodox disunity in America are untrue, inconsistent with Orthodox theology, mask the very serious nature and consequences of our present division, and steal the sense of urgency that the Spirit of God births in the hearts of the faithful in the face of disunity.

And make no mistake. The Spirit of the Living God does not tolerate disunity, which is the un-doer of His divine work and the spoiler of His mighty wonders. He is not going to passively stand aside when the unity He effects has a stake driven into it. The Holy Spirit has always inspired and guided the saints to rail against disunity. King David himself, the inspired author of Ps. 132, was exceedingly zealous to preserve and enhance the unity of the Old Testament Church. While King Saul was reigning and persecuting David, David was exceedingly careful to preserve an attitude of reverence for Saul and not to divide the people. Despite the danger to his very life, let alone the material losses he constantly suffered, David refused to set himself up as a rival monarch and thus effect schism in Israel. He refused to establish his jurisdiction against Saul's jurisdiction. After Saul's death David was received as King only by southern portion of the Kingdom, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Far from being content shepherding just his tribe, David gave himself for seven years and six months to reconciling all the twelve tribes and reunifying the Kingdom. He considered himself weak, though King, as long as the Kingdom was divided. And as long as there is division we will always be weak. For thirty-three more years King David ruled the entire nation, and eventually passed the throne to his son, Solomon.

If King David was so zealous to preserve and deepen the unity of the Church in the Old Covenant, how much more ought the pastors of the Church in the New Covenant be zealous to preserve and deepen the unity of the Church when the Holy Spirit has been poured out and our union with Christ and each other is no longer a union of shadows but of reality?! Since we live after Holy Pentecost, on which day the Spirit was poured out calling all men into unity, as we say in the Festal Kontakion, how can we not be zealous for unity? Where was the spirit of King David in 1921 when competing jurisdictions were first sinfully established in this nation? I am afraid the spirit of unity left our land with the departure from this life of St. Raphael (Hawaweeny), Bishop of Brooklyn, who labored in and for a united American Orthodox Church, and fell asleep in the Lord in 1915. St. Raphael ought to serve as the heavenly patron of American Orthodox unity. His spirit is profoundly expressed in his duly famous words, "I am an Arab by birth, a Greek by primary education, an American by residence, a Russian at heart, and a Slav in soul." Such hierarchic sensitivity to the unity of the Church is desperately lacking at the current time. Where was the spirit of King David in the aftermath of the Ligonier meeting of 1994? How grieved we were when our holy hierarchs, having been so attracted to each other when face to face by a divine magnetism that they could not but declare themselves to be an episcopal assembly -- a forerunner to a common American synod -- and unanimously issued two magnificent common statements: On the Church in North America and On Mission and Evangelism, and then when they encountered opposition from various quarters walked away from the quest for unity at Ligonier, some even renouncing their signatures and one his mere presence? Forgive me, but the immediate aftermath of Ligonier and the days since have been shameful days in which disunity has been tragically increased and expanded, days of sorrowful memory that we wish to consign to oblivion. We look for better days, days of unity and refreshment.

Under King Solomon the unity of Israel was preserved, and deepened and as a unified nation Israel bore witness to the unbelieving peoples throughout the world. Pagan kings and great sages and the whole earth itself journeyed to Israel in those days to behold the Servant of the Lord, Solomon, who ruled a united kingdom in unsurpassed wisdom. Unity is the key to successful witness. Even heretics when united have great strength.

The Mormons may have a theology worthy of disdain, but their unity has made them a powerful force in the world and they increase mightily. American Muslims, Shia and Sunni, have forged a unity in this country that has brought them great strength. American Muslims, by their desire for unity, have overcome far greater obstacles than any two Orthodox jurisdictions have with each other, and have established significant cooperative ventures such as ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), AMC (American Muslim Council), the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Alliance, the Islamic Circle of North America, IMANA Islamic Medical Association of North America), the Muslim Student Association, some 1000 Islamic academies to insure their Muslim children remain Muslim, and a host of Islamic journals and magazines. By their unity these non-Christians without the Holy Spirit have accomplished much. We Orthodox Christians ought to compare our respective numbers closely with American Muslims. There are approximately 1,600 mosques in America, just as there are approximately 1,600 Orthodox church temples in America. They are fairly united. We are significantly divided. Let us see who does the growing in the next decade. And why is it that the Roman Catholics in the United States have been able to care for the pastoral needs of its multiple ethnicities in this country, while on the whole maintaining episcopal and synodal unity? In the face of these examples we are without excuse.

After Solomon's death the throne passed to his son, Rehoboam. It was during King Rehoboam's reign that the rupture and division of the Kingdom took place. It was this disunity which led to Israel's eventual collapse and utter exile. By Rehoboam's sinful disregard of unity the ten northern tribes rejected his rule, and enthroned Jeroboam as King. The fruit of such disunity was immediate and tragic, leading to internal sin, strife, and cultic deviations, and within slightly more than 200 years the 10 northern tribes were taken into exile by the Assyrians -- an exile from which the vast majority would never return. Can you just hear the Israelites in the north saying during these years under Jeroboam and his successors- "when God wills we will be reunited with the southern tribes" or "unity will happen but not in my lifetime" or "we are not mature enough for unity with Jerusalem yet"? I can see King Jeroboam aggressively publicizing these nonsensical quips and propaganda throughout his schismatic kingdom, all the while fearing that he may lose power if reunion with Jerusalem were effected. If any Israelites were saying such things as I suggest during those days they were idiots, and they probably knew themselves to be such as they walked with hooks in their noses into Assyrian lands in A. D. 722, consigned for all time to utter exile and oblivion.

The division of American Orthodox Christians in what we call jurisdictionalism is not just unfortunate, or an unenviable quirk of modern church history. It is a heinous sin, and a lamentable grieving of the Holy Spirit, Who is the divine cement of our unity. Listen to the words written in 1976 by Father Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory, former Dean of St. Vladimir Seminary and one-time member of SCOBA's Commission on Unity in America,

When today, almost two hundred years after the implanting of Orthodoxy on the American continent, one hears endless debates about the future Orthodox unification in America as a remote and not too realistic ideal, to which one ritually pays lip service while in fact opposing its realization, one is amazed by the conscious or unconscious denial of a simple fact: that this unity did exist, was a reality, that the first "epiphany" of Orthodoxy here was not as a jungle of ethnic ecclesiastical colonies, serving primarily if not exclusively the interests of their various "nationalisms" and "Mother Churches," but precisely as a Local Church meant to transcend all "natural" divisions and to share all spiritual values; that this unity was broken and then arbitrarily replaced with the unheard-of principle of "jurisdictional multiplicity" which denies and transgresses every single norm of Orthodox Tradition; that the situation which exists today is thus truly a sin and a tragedy." (emphases his).

A sin and a tragedy. These are his words, and the divisions are worse today in 2006 than they were thirty years ago in 1976. Far worse. We are not moving forwards. For at least 12 years, since the failure following Ligonier, we have been moving backwards. Maybe you consider Fr. Schmemann's statements extreme. If you do, perhaps you have been poisoned by the indifference of persons who are fond of pontificating on the theme of Orthodox unity by saying things like, "It will happen, but not in my lifetime" or "When God wills" or "We are not mature enough for it yet." Fooey and ix-nay on all those statements. Let us examine these quips a bit more closely.

Quip #1. "It will happen, but not in my lifetime."

Really? Says who? Where is it written that the Church will prevail apart from the fidelity of its clergy and laity? Is such faithfulness promised? Did God inspire someone with a prophecy assuring that the American Orthodox Church would overcome its pettiness and triumph over its divisions? I know of no such prophecy. Certainly the Church of Jesus Christ is indefectible and indestructible and will triumph over the world. There is no question about that. But such victory is not promised to every Orthodox person, every Orthodox clergyman, every Orthodox parish, or every Orthodox national church, irrespective of will. God honors our freedom by allowing us to ruin ourselves if we so desire. If a particular Orthodox Christian wishes to jump into the arms of the devil and ruin his life he is free to do so. If an Orthodox parish wants to grieve the Holy Spirit by pride and infighting to the point of dissolving and no longer existing as a parish it is free to do so, as we can see by how many parishes are dying throughout our land. If an Orthodox priest or bishop wants to dance with the demons and embrace heresy and find himself severed from the Body of Christ and defrocked from the holy priesthood he is free to do so. And if a national Church wants to perpetrate division and turn a blind eye to grievous family disunity to the point of rendering itself irrelevant and eventually non-existent it is free to do so. And don't think this has never happened. Read the letters of our Lord Jesus Christ to the particular 1st century churches of Asia Minor found in the Revelation of St. John, chapters two and three. The message of our Lord was clear. Pull yourselves together or I will remove your candlestick. He was telling them to live their faith or be snuffed out. Some of them were.

Orthodox reunion in America (and I choose the word "reunion" carefully since we are striving for the re-establishment of a unity we already had not the creation of something completely new) ... The unity of the Orthodox Church in America will take place in our land when the Church in America wants it to take place in our land. If we repent our divisions and recover ourselves and apply the antidote of humility to the bitter unfolding of recent local church history our disunity will be healed. And we ought stop blaming others for our ills, and accept responsibility for our divisions. If we continue to walk stubbornly according to our own jurisdictional drummers, studiously indifferent to the greater unity of the Church in our land there will never be one American Orthodox Church. God does not force His will upon unwilling children. If we want to continue in sin, He will let us, unless His judgment falls first. But there will be no proper Orthodox unity in our land apart from our commitment to such unity. And frankly, such commitment is seriously lacking at the present. This should greatly concern us, and the voice of faithful clergy and laity should be raised, and the trumpets should be sounding- but, of course, those who somehow have a mystical assurance that "it will happen but not in their lifetime" are not very concerned. Why should they be? They have their bogus assurance.

This improper perspective on church unity in America is also detrimental to our efforts at Orthodox reunion because of the assumption that the divisions we sustain presently are so great that no significant change is possible "within my lifetime." Such notions insure that no great efforts will be taken toward unity by such believers. Tell me- who sacrifices his life for a cause he believes is doomed to failure throughout his lifetime? Who will shed his blood for a cause that he believes will not be very helped by his blood? St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in his treatise On the Trinity, says it this way, "When anyone entertains no hope of attaining his end, then he either loves lukewarmly or does not love at all, howsoever he may see the excellence of it." As long as we continue to think that the unity of the American Orthodox Church cannot be established in a generation we will continue to love our unity lukewarmly or not at all.

Quip #2. "When God wills."

Now normally such a statement is most beautiful. But in this context it is simply an awful distortion of reality. Is there really any question at all what God wills in this matter? We know His will very clearly. He wills what He commands, and He commands the unity of the Church -- one bishop in one city, one synod in one nation, one local brotherhood of priests, one body of the faithful, and no overlapping jurisdictions. To say "When God wills" in this context of division is to imply that God has something to do with our divisions. It is at best meaningless and at worse a sinful backhanded reproach of the Almighty. A more accurate statement would be "When we will." No one is arguing over what God wills in the matter. Everyone basically agrees. We may not agree on who exactly is to be the head of the American Orthodox Church, but no one is suggesting that we are not to have one synod of bishops in our land. We know this is God's will. That we find ourselves broken into more than 10 different jurisdictions is a commentary on human fallenness not God's will. Can you imagine if someone you know fell into the heinous sin of adultery? For years he refused to stop, and in response to your loving and firm entreaties that he repent he answered you that he would, "When God wills." How ridiculous. God does not will adultery, nor does He will division.

Quip #3. "We are not mature enough yet for church unity."

The unity of the Church is not the reward of maturity, but the expression of it! Mature people do God's will. They do not get mature and then start doing it. The doing of God's will is the maturity. If a Church exists it is by definition as a Church mature enough. If it were not it would not be a Church. And on top of that, disunity is not immaturity -- it is sin. A young national church may not have as many saints, or as many parishes, or as many monasteries, or as many universities, charities, or social influence as an old and more mature Church- but if it is a Church it must be united according to the requirements of our Savior. If it is not, it is deficient in its very churchliness. Besides that, as Father Schmemann so poignantly mentioned, it is a historical fact the Church in America used to have unity. We used to have an ethnically diverse but united synod of bishops. Our unity was lost at a definite moment in time, and our task is to recover it. Orthodox reunion, not Orthodox union, is the call of the hour.

The Bitter Fruits of Disunity

While virtually every American Orthodox Christian has some story or other to relate how our divisions have wounded them personally and caused grief it is important I think to face something of a substantial enumeration of the sad fruits of our division. Our division manifests itself in many practical and pastoral ways:

1. Some Orthodox jurisdictions receive persons from Latin and certain Protestant bodies into Holy Orthodoxy by baptism and chrismation, some by chrismation alone, and some merely by confession of faith.
2. Some Orthodox jurisdictions receive Latin clergy converting to Holy Orthodoxy merely by vesting, while others ordain.
3. Some Orthodox jurisdictions recognize all marriages performed outside Holy Orthodoxy as being real marriages (though certainly not sacramental) whether performed for an Orthodox or non-Orthodox, while others recognize no marriages performed outside Holy Orthodoxy whether performed for an Orthodox or a non-Orthodox. This results in someone being denied a fourth marriage in one jurisdiction while being permitted a marriage (and a first one at that!) in another jurisdiction; someone being denied ordination in one jurisdiction because of a previous marriage outside the Church, while being accepted as a candidate for ordination in another jurisdiction; a non-Orthodox married couple having to be married by the Church when they convert one jurisdiction, while in another they are received without a need for an Orthodox marriage service to be performed for them. In some jurisdictions "inter-faith" marriages mean those that are between an Orthodox and a non-Orthodox, while in other an "inter-faith" marriage means a marriage even between two Orthodox Christians from various jurisdictions.
4. Some Orthodox jurisdictions bury suicides under certain circumstances, while others forbid the burial of suicides under all circumstances.
5. Some Orthodox jurisdictions bury a person who was cremated with all funeral rites in the church temple, others permit only Trisagion Prayers of Mercy in the funeral home, some forbid any prayers anywhere for a person who was cremated.
6. Some Orthodox jurisdictions recognize civil divorce as complete and sufficient for ecclesiastical purposes, while others do not recognize civil divorce at all and insist on Church Tribunals, while yet other deal with divorce in other ways.
7. Some Orthodox jurisdictions penance a person when he/she is divorced (either by civil or Church court), while others penance a person only after he/she enters into a second or third marriage.
8. Some Orthodox jurisdictions accept clergy suspended or even deposed by other Orthodox jurisdictions.
9. Some Orthodox jurisdictions ignore bans of excommunication pronounced by hierarchs of other Orthodox jurisdictions.

These divisions of pastoral practice, which are so confusing to our people and to outsiders, are sustained only because our bishops do not meet together in a common synod. And these are simply some of the pastoral anomalies engendered by our divisions that are detrimental to the health of the Orthodox flock. Besides the pastoral pains of division, there are also the very serious theological issues at stake in the elongation and tolerance of our disunity. Is it just my nose, or do others smell the foul stench of the heresy of phyletism lying behind the present indifference to unity? When phyletism was condemned as a heresy by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in A. D. 1872 in the face of Bulgarian attempts to set up an ethnic Bulgarian jurisdiction with the Patriarchate of Constantinople was not just this sort of staking of ethnic divisions within one nation categorically forbidden and castigated as heresy?

Are parallel ethnic dioceses intolerable heresy in the Ottoman Empire, but in America parallel ethnic dioceses are Orthodox, or at least tolerable? I do not understand. Such a perversion of Orthodox ecclesiology was not tolerated for one moment at that time by the Ecumenical Patriarch, and was definitively ruled against within two years while under Ottoman domination. We have been suffering in our canonical chaos already for eighty years. It does not take a neurosurgeon to see that some, evidently, do not care much about our tragic disunity. It is in this light that we should listen carefully to the counsel of His Eminence, Metropolitan Philip: "Nothing will happen unless we make it happen." And, indeed, for a long time nothing has happened, for we have not made it happen. Do we not see the love of ethnic tradition rising above love of the pan-ethnic and transnational Church of Jesus Christ, in which particular nationalisms and ethnic make-ups are but minor matters?

Today, as a result of the long exile from canonical fidelity in which we have been walking, most American Orthodox Christians, when they speak of their "church", sadly, most often mean their jurisdiction in America, not the corporate American Orthodox Church. Jurisdiction has replaced Church in our distorted phronema and divided state of existence. As a result we really have no idea what is going on in American Orthodoxy. If we are Antiochians we may speak about the Church "growing" for instance. But what we really mean is our "jurisdiction" is growing. We are not privy to the fact that some Orthodox jurisdictions are significantly shrinking, and so our missionary optimism is skewed. We may think our Church is prospering financially and taking good care of her clergy, but in reality, overall, the Church in our land may be mired in debt. We simply do not know because we are isolated in our jurisdictions.

In this deformed type of spiritual life we are not able to fully live as members of the Body of Christ. How are we to weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice, when the joys and sorrows of the majority of our Orthodox brothers and sisters in our nation, and even in our own cities and towns, remain beyond our knowledge since we are insulated and isolated from the true corporate body by our jurisdictional lines of communication? How many Orthodox failed to pray for the repose of Archbishop Iakovos simply because he was a bishop of another jurisdiction? In our divisions we live apart from the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, since the New Testament makes no promises of a catholicity to jurisdictions, but to a united Church. Our spiritual life is hampered.

What about the massive loss of resources due to our divisions? I have a recurring nightmare at our bi-annual Archdiocesan conventions. In the nightmare our hierarchs are in a terrible accident while they are in a limousine or plane in route to the convention. All are killed, and the Archdiocese is doomed since, as a result of jurisdictionalism, we do not have sufficient celibate candidates to replace our hierarchs. Since our Archdiocese has none of "its own" monasteries in America many of our young people with celibate callings have become monks in the monasteries of other jurisdictions. I have two talented young people from my parish alone that have become monastics of OCA monasteries. Such young people become ineligible to serve our jurisdiction as future bishops because they are in the monasteries of other jurisdictions. This is a fine example of how the fullness of spiritual gifts promised by our Savior to the corporate Church may be lacking to a jurisdiction. Our very catholicity is imperiled by jurisdictionalism.

What are the consequences of willful negligence and disregard of the sacred canons? Since the holy canons make up a portion of Holy Tradition, of the common life in the Holy Spirit which Tradition is, how is the fullness of our Christian life being compromised? Who can live a full spiritual life at all in this sustained compromised ecclesiastical ethos? And then we have the awful abuse of the word diaspora to apply to the American Orthodox faithful as though we are sojourning here in America and hoping to return to some other land on this earth. And what of the appearance in the last 80 years of a completely novel interpretation of Canon 28 of the Holy Fourth Ecumenical Synod about the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the appearance of papal theories of ecclesiology? These are matters of Orthodox faith and practice, not simply crusty matters of church polity. And ought we not draw some conclusions from the fact that our jurisdictional multiplicity in our land was inaugurated by an ecclesiastical personality of the likes of Patriarch Meletios IV (Metaxakis) of Constantinople? Though he was a man of immense energy and made many positive contributions to the Church, by his actions he shattered the unity of Orthodoxy in our land by establishing the Greek Archdiocese, "the first ecclesiastical body to be organized in America on a purely ethnic basis and independently from the canonically established territorial North American Diocese."

There is also the serious crimping of our evangelical witness. We have our lamp under a bushel. Let me give you an example of the bitter fruit of our divisions and how it kills our missionary endeavors. Many Americans are coming face to face with Orthodoxy for the first time. Many of our parishes have significant classes of catechumens each year, despite the fact that we have no formal evangelistic programs. Yet we are not receiving into the Church all that we should be. For example, my parish began to catechize a wonderful family two years ago. Husband, wife, and four children. Very sincere and devoted. Unfortunately, this family has not become Orthodox and now only occasionally visits the parish. When I asked why this was the case the husband said, "I simply find it hard to believe that you are the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and are so divided." Brothers and sisters, the souls of human beings are in the balance because of our divisions. Before you say, "This family is nuts. They should have gotten over it and not made such a big deal," listen to the statement of SCOBA's Ad Hoc Commission on Unity as reported in the Minutes of the SCOBA Meeting XI in 1970, presented by such lights as Frs. Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, in which just such a hampered missionary witness is predicted,

The Orthodox Church cannot claim to be the true, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church if she is actually divided into a plurality of mutually independent, competing, and overlapping jurisdictions. This division has long ago ceased to be justified by the peculiarities of Orthodox immigration in America, and has become an open scandal to the faithful, a source of demoralization and dissatisfaction in the laity, and an obstacle to any effort or progress.

And who can blame someone for not wanting to join a divided family? A family where all the uncles almost never meet together, and rarely speak? Imagine the "Smith" family for a moment. Would you not consider it a tragic state of affairs if a family made up of parents, children and grandchildren, while all living in the same city, routinely met together only in select and separated groups? If certain members of the family studiously drove right by the homes of their brothers and sisters and never stopped in, communicated, or regularly gathered? Who would want anything to do with such a family? In many ways this is how a good portion of our Orthodox family is in America. We are a broken family, out of touch, uninterested in each other's lives, and happy to go about our own isolated jurisdictional business. Like two people who are unjustifiably and sinfully divorced- the only solution is reconciliation and remarriage. Time alone simply will not heal the schism, as 85 years have demonstrated.

Recommendations for the Accomplishment of Orthodox Church Unity in America

As Galadriel said to Frodo I now suggest to you, brothers and sisters: "The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. One misstep and all may be lost." We have seen in recent church history that the pursuit of unity is more sensitive than anyone really imagined, and fraught with danger on many sides. What will the Mother Churches say? What will the other bishops do? What will the American faithful say? What will the recent immigrants say? Every one has a task to fulfill in the quest for unity, and the Lord God expects every Orthodox man and woman to do his duty in this regard. The Mother Churches have an important role to play; the bishops of the various jurisdictions that constitute SCOBA have an important role. The clergy have their own task, and the faithful a unique calling in this quest.

But if I may be so bold, I suggest that the solution lies primarily and fundamentally in the hands of the bishops in America. On many occasions, when I have suggested unity lies within the will and purview of the bishops I have been countered with comments to the effect that the bishops are often bound by their people's desires. That has not been my experience or observation. If that were true then probably we would have unity already since the people appear to be more committed and desirous of unity than the hierarchs. If the will of the people was so powerful as to hinder the bishops, then why has it not hindered their inactivity in the cause of unity? I suggest that the truth is more simple- that Orthodox bishops, who are to be by definition the very symbols of the unity of the Church, have, in fact, in a most contorted reversal, become the very symbols of disunity in the Church ... and don't seem to be too concerned about it. Where are the initiatives coming from the various synods? Where are the nursing of cross-jurisdictional episcopal unity? Forgive me, but the shepherds are responsible, not the sheep. If the sheep are responsible, it is perhaps that they have not bleated often or loudly enough as to secure the attention of their shepherds.

Towards a practical accomplishment of unity I would like to offer the following suggestions, as ways to move forward. I have designed the following recommendations to be basically unobjectionable from the standpoint of the Mother Churches, that is, I have designed these recommendations in such a way that they do not require anyone's official approval.

1. The long-dormant SCOBA Commission on Orthodox Unity, which was established and very active from the inception of SCOBA in 1960 until the grant of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970, be re-enlivened in order to address all the issues of unity, beginning with pastoral/canonical matters which directly impact the lives of each and every Orthodox person (clergy or lay) in the United States. This Commission should pursue all areas of unity that do not require official endorsement from our Mother Churches, legal changes, or anything else that may be thrown at us by any naysayers. Chief amongst these should be the establishing of common pastoral practices so as to end our divisions of pastoral economy.
   
   
2. Each jurisdiction should fund the creation of an official Department of Church Unity that would gather together the most talented and dedicated workers for unity within each jurisdiction in order to promote and further their efforts. Can we be taken seriously about our commitment to missions if we fund no Department of Missions and support no missionaries? Can we be taken seriously about our commitment to church education if we fund no church education, publish no books, and hold no educational conferences? Why would we expect anyone, and God most importantly, to take our commitment to unity seriously if we spend not a single penny on accomplishing it? "Oh sure, we are committed to unity. Really we are! We do no serious thinking about it, publish no material, spend no money on the cause, hold no conferences, but we do spend five minutes every two years at our conventions and pass a resolution saying we want it." Who would be ignorant enough to believe, based on this evidence, that it is a priority? We must put our money where our mouths are: period. If we Antiochians are serious about Church unity we need to show it with $. This department would have numerous duties including at least the following:
   
   
• Interview extensively all of the hierarchs of the Orthodox Churches in America, discern their thoughts, and gather their opinions and suggestions on unity, in an attempt to reveal the true opinion about Church unity of each. This should be done using a detailed questionnaire. This will enable the Church both gather great wisdom and discern who really cares about unity and who does not. I suggest we may find that some hierarchs are more interested in uniting with Roman Catholics and/or Protestants than with their own Orthodox brethren.
• Those bishops that have promoted worthy initiatives for unity should be highlighted, and their good efforts documented and distributed.
• Report annually to the diocesan assemblies, clergy symposia and/or summer conventions.
• Travel as a delegation to the Holy Synods of the Mother Churches and present our case and seek the support, guidance, and blessing of the Mother Churches.
  
  
I presented this proposal to a leading layman in our Archdiocese several years ago for consideration. His response at that time was that he liked the idea very much, but that it would not happen since it costs too much money. I assured him at that time that our clergy and people care for nothing more zealously than the unity of the Church, and that if we publicized our intention, announced the Metropolitan's pick to head the Department, and then solicited funds we would certainly raise even more than we need. Today I can respond even better by making a very tangible financial proposal to cover the initial costs of the Department. My proposal is simply this: abolish our Department of Communications and give up the idea of having our own separate jurisdictional web site which costs us some $200,000 every year and is one of the most obvious examples of how disunity presents an image of a fractured Orthodoxy to the general public as it pillages our treasuries as we also invest in multiple overlapping ministries. Unite the web sites of the various jurisdictions under an official SCOBA site, pay one webmaster for us all, and save hundreds of thousands of dollars and then use that money to launch of Department of Church Unity!


3. Each jurisdiction should dedicate their Clergy Symposia (perhaps the next several until it is done) to the theme of the American Orthodox Church. The majority of priests would like nothing better I assure you. Bring in speakers who have thoughts to guide us in accomplishing unity. Study the history of other Churches that have achieved autocephaly. Educate. If the priests are educated, then they will educate their people, and then maybe they could get the bishops interested.
   
   
4. By means of Archpastoral Letters call the faithful to consecrate Great Lent (and/or other appropriate fasting seasons) to pray for the accomplishment of Orthodox Church unity in America. Ask the priests and faithful to fast sincerely and beseech the Lord for forgiveness for our divisions and indifference. Create petitions to be added to the Litany of Fervent Supplication in our divine services that supplicate the Holy Trinity for an end to the schisms of the churches in America, and for the speedy establishment of one American Orthodox Church. Thus we ground our quest for church unity in regular prayers. This would raise the consciousness of the clergy and the people significantly. Compare this situation to slavery in America. Abolitionists raised the consciousness of the sin, and kept it raised until it was abolished. We must not just raise the consciousness, we must sustain it until it is fixed.
   
   
5. Orthodox jurisdictions should organize joint summer conventions so that we never again have overlapping jurisdictional conventions. At these conventions there can initially be separate rooms used for general assemblies of the various jurisdictions to do their business, but our divine services, teaching times, youth meetings, and social functions, etc. would all be together. Our bishops would meet together. Our priests would fraternize. All would cross-pollinate. What is to stop such an easily accomplished thing except the will to act for unity? And we would save lots of money at that.
   
   
6. A new commemorative book ought to be written lauding and memorializing Ligonier 1994, re-publishing its documents, explaining the immense tragedy that has taken place since 1994, and detailing the nature of the sinfulness of church division in our country. We need a simple place to refer to see how our current situation is theologically heretical, canonically irregular, and practically devastating to our witness. Its goal should be to convince the reader that this is not a matter of fixing an unfortunate problem when it is convenient to do so, but of repenting of an intolerable and unnecessary schism.
   
   
7. Expose un-Orthodox ecclesiology in the footsteps of St. Raphael of Brooklyn, who wrote several critical exposes (even under a pseudonym) of ecclesiastical injustices, making an exposé of ecclesiastical injustice wherever it is found suppressing and hindering the unity of the Church. St. Paul writes, "Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but even expose them."
   
   
8. Remove all ethnic and jurisdictional references in the titles of our churches both in letterhead and church signs and promotional materials. Our churches should be called "St. N. Orthodox Church" or "St. N. Orthodox Christian Church" but no longer "St. Andrew Greek/Russian/Antiochian/Serbian ... Church". Such designations may be necessary for "in house" identification, but they certainly sound confusing, restrictive, uninviting, and foreign to the greater non-Orthodox world. Why are we proclaiming our divisions and encouraging people to think that Orthodoxy is only for foreigners or only for people of a certain ethnic or geographical background? We can and ought be proud of our heritage, but without waving the flag of jurisdictionalism in the face of America.
   
   
9. Request of our Orthodox Seminaries to foster serious academic engagement over the quest for Orthodox unity, both engaging each other in cooperative ventures and nourishing the Orthodox phronema in our seminarians on this subject of Orthodox unity.
   
   
10. Nurture support for American Orthodox church unity from Orthodox Christians around the world, making the case to them for a strong undivided American Church, and soliciting the good will, financial support, and constructive advice of Orthodox leaders throughout the world who can lend much needed moral support to our efforts. In the 1960s Archbishop Iakovos insisted upon such an effort by SCOBA's Commission on Orthodox Unity in America.
    
    
11. Fulfill your personal obligations to pursue unity. These personal obligations should include the following: daily prayer for the unity of the Church, speaking correctly regarding your self-identification as an "Orthodox Christian in America" and not as a Greek, Serb, Arab, or Englishman, or part of some ethnic tradition in Orthodoxy, embracing all Orthodox Christians in your parish from whatever backgrounds they come and working against the formation of ethnic cliques in parishes (by the way- Anglo converts can be just as ethnic and clique-ish as any other group), supporting the use of English in the liturgy, celebrating the patronal feasts of all the Orthodox Churches local to your place of residence regardless of jurisdiction, speaking to your bishop and priest regularly about your sincere desire for their leadership in the quest for unity, financially supporting efforts for unity, encouraging foreign language parishes where such are justified by pastoral need in serving recent immigrants, etc. None of these pursuits require anyone else's cooperation. They can and should be fulfilled as holy obligations by every Orthodox Christian in America.
    
    

An Encouraging Word in Conclusion

I have not intended to overwhelm you, my dear brothers and sisters. Please forgive me for my mistakes, my ignorance, or my poor judgments. I am not offering any last word on the subject of unity or even anything inspiring or definitive that has not been articulated by those who love the unity of the Church more than I and know the path to reunion better. I have simply made an effort to articulate as best as I can what I believe to be the mind of Christ, which is the mind of the Church, on this pressing subject of the divisions we are sustaining. I know the days are dark, the clouds are overhead, and it looks bleak. But we are not without hope. There is no word sufficient to hymn the Lord's wonders, and He is not a God who turns a deaf ear to the humble petitions of His children, at least not yet I am trusting. The unity, which we can hardly foresee, may simply be hiding close behind the dark clouds, which obscure our vision. No one desires the unity of the Church in our land more than the Lord God Himself.

I leave you with this encouraging story. It comes from the pioneers of our nation, the pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation. The story concerns one indentured servant name John Howland, who was traveling on the Mayflower with his master, the soon-to-be first governor of Plymouth, R. Carver. The journey across the Atlantic Ocean was frightful, and one day the Mayflower encountered a huge gale. Being in danger of sinking, the captain turned the boat against the wind, lowered the sails, and attempted to ride out the storm. All the 102 pilgrims and strangers were sent below deck, and ordered to remain there for their safety's sake. Young John Howland, however, grew restless and so he ventured upstairs and wandered out on the deck. No sooner had he stepped out but a large wave struck him and he was hurled in the wind right off the side of the Mayflower into the stormy sea. The sailors considered him certainly lost, and in truth John was fast being driven by the wind away from the ship and under water. As he was flailing for his life his hand passed over a rope from the mast, which was unfurled and also flailing in the water. With all his strength he grasped on to the rope and help on for dear life. In that position he was suppressed more than 10 feet under water by the storm, when the sailors noticed that the rope was taught and began to hurriedly attempt to pull John Howland out of the deeps up on to the deck. They were successful at getting him above water and then using a fishhook on the end of a long pole they pulled him up on to the deck safe and sound. That John Howland endured, and he went on to outlive all the other pilgrims, to marry a beautiful wife named Elizabeth, to raise ten children of his own, and eighty-eight grandchildren and to contribute significantly to the initial establishment of what would become our dear nation!

Brothers and Sisters! We too are pilgrims seeking to live in the promised land of the Church, and we are in the midst of a great storm, the Tempest Disunity. In many ways it seems that we will never reach the shore, and frankly, at times it appears that we are holding on for dear life to a very thin rope. Do not let go my dear brothers and sisters. It may be that we are on the cusp of being pulled up and out of our distress and of obtaining the very thing we seek, and that soon, as it was in John Howland's case, fruitfulness, the fruitfulness of unity, may be upon us to the true up building of our Church in America. May it be, by the grace of our God, by the prayers of your holy Bishop, and for the salvation of our people.

Fr. Josiah Trenham is pastor of St. Andrew Church in Riverside, California.

The Nuptial Mystery

by Angelo Cardinal Scola

From Communio: "The Nuptial Mystery: A Prespective for Systematic Theology?"

A Thomistic Order of Learning

first thoughts...

Bachelor of Arts

• Trivium + Quadrivium (including logic and arithmetic, geometry)
  
• For terminal degrees: ethics, introduction to philosophy of nature
• supplemented by literature and history (as supplements, not to displace the primary roles played by rhetoric and logic, which are aimed at preparing one for composition and speech)

Master of Philosophy

• philosophy of nature (including examination and critique of the scientific method; dialectical examination of accumulated data)

• ethics and politics (begin with Aristotle's politics, supplemented by sociological studies of various cultures and economies; includes a historical inquiry into the development of medieval political theory and rights/natural law theory)

• metaphysics

• advanced mathematics (including examination and critique of modern number theory, calculus, etc.)

Dialectical examination of other opinions (historical study) subsumed within the above.

Theology
positive theology
Sacra Pagina
Church Fathers
dogmatic theology -- councils and decrees
speculative theology

Embryonic Issues

source

January 22, 2007 1:00 PM

Embryonic Issues

To the Editor

Dear Professors Lee and George,

Thank you for responding to my letter, which took issue with points raised in your earlier NRO review of my book Challenging Nature. In your response, you continue to insist absolutely — as you have in numerous articles published on this topic — that a human embryo is a human being, while other clumps of human cells are something entirely different. Rather than continuing to debate this claim in prose, it is useful to take a more visual approach, as illustrated by comparing the two pictures below. Both show color-enhanced scanning electron micrographs of clumps of human cells. But before they were frozen for microscopy, one clump was a normal embryo, while the other was a bunch of embryonic stem cells. According to your logic, one clump was a human being, while the other was just a confined group of proteins, DNA, and other molecules. So tell me, Which one is which?

Perhaps you can’t tell the difference by external appearance alone (I certainly can’t). But even if you could look inside with the finest microscope, it almost certainly wouldn’t help because there is almost certainly no molecule, or combination of molecules, whose presence or absence distinguishes all human embryos from embryonic stem cells. At this point, you may retreat to your previous claim that only the real human embryo has “the epigenetic primordia for a functioning brain and nervous system.” I haven’t a clue what the term “epigenetic primordia” means since it has not been used (as far as I know) by any scientist in any of the hundreds of thousands of basic biological research articles published over the last decade.

I know this little exercise won’t change your mind; I present it simply for the benefit of more open-minded NRO readers. Indeed, it is pointless to debate scientific details when even simple words like “life” and “death” are interpreted by you in ways that are foreign to most practicing biologists. So instead, I would like to put to the test your ‘argument from authority’ claim, which holds that the embryo-is-a-human-being proposition “is a fact confirmed by contemporary embryology and attested to by the standard works in the field.” In fact, none of the standard texts you’ve quoted — or any other prominent biology textbook used at major nonsectarian universities — actually states that an “embryo” is a “human being?” (It won’t do to pretend that biologists use the term “human life” as a standard synonym for “human being.” Human cells growing and dividing indefinitely in petri dishes are fully alive — in biological terms — and fully human in their constituent parts, and yet you yourselves do not consider them to be human beings.)

Furthermore, if the embryo-is-a-human-being proposition really is “confirmed by contemporary embryology,” you might expect at least one of the 52 active professors in the two biology departments at the esteemed university where Professor George and I teach to acknowledge this supposedly confirmed “fact.” I challenge Professor George to identify one — just one — Princeton biology professor who shares this viewpoint. (As an incentive, if you can come up with one name, I will buy you both a case of wine from the same vineyard that produced the delightful bottle I shared with Professor George at a pleasant dinner some years ago.)

If your search for like-minded Princeton biologists comes up empty- handed, you might argue that the liberal or libertarian milieu of Ivy League science faculties discourages professors from expressing any truly-held conservative views. But, in fact, many unabashed, culturally conservative academics simply don’t agree with you either. One who takes exception is University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, the former chairman of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, on which Professor George also sits. Kass has written, “I myself would agree that a blastocyst [an embryo that is 4 to 9 days post- fertilization] is not, in a full sense, a human being.” (Toward a More Natural Science, p.104). Not only is Professor Kass an accomplished scholar in the area of bioethics, he also holds both a medical degree and a Harvard Ph.D. in biochemistry. I assume, Professor George, that you’ve had many chances to persuade Professor Kass with your “careful argumentation and the presentation of the relevant biological facts,” and (as far as I can tell), you haven’t succeeded. Indeed, from my admittedly subjective point of view, it seems that most academic biologists, most nonsectarian bioethicists, most physicians, and most university-educated conservatives (forget about liberals and libertarians) don’t agree with you. So what gives. Are they all stupid, ignorant, or disingenuous?

As I stated in my previous letter, there is nothing — no fact or concept — that will ever make you budge from your belief in the unassailable truth of the view that an embryo is a human being. It is this form of absolutism that led me to brand you as fundamentalists, mocked in the title of your original book review. However, since I was not raised or educated in a strictly religious tradition, you could argue that I don’t really understand the difference between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. But there’s no need to take my word for it because the self-described practicing-Catholic and conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan reaches exactly the same conclusion about Professor George in his hard-hitting new book, The Conservative Soul. According to Sullivan, George and others who hold his extreme views are fundamentalists. Sullivan explains that “the fundamentalist does not tolerate a diversity of views. There is one truth; and all other pretenders are threats to it, or contradict it . . . Fundamentalists assert a central core idea and then contort or distort reality in order to make it fit their model.” In a world where life and death become entirely divorced from any connection to modern biological understanding, only faith remains. It is faith of a particular type, not science, that drives the belief that the embryo shown in one of the pictures above is a human being, while the other object is not. This sort of faith is not amenable to debate, which is why this will be my final word on the subject.

Lee M. Silver
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.

Patrick Lee and Robert P. George respond: Lee Silver continues to bluster and spin in an effort to depict people who disagree with him as “fundamentalists” who rely on religious faith, rather than science, for their beliefs about matters of biological fact. It is Professor Silver himself, however, who refuses to face up to the scientific facts about human embryos.

The point at issue is whether human embryos are or are not human beings in the embryonic stage of their natural development. We say they are; Silver claims they are not. Here is another way of putting the question: Does the term “human embryo” refer to something distinct from a human being (in the way that terms like “alligator,” “cotton,” and “stone” — or even terms like “human liver” or “human fingernail” — refer to things distinct from human beings), or does it refer to a human being at a certain stage of development (in the way that terms like “infant,” “adolescent,” and “adult” refer to stages of development)?

Plainly, the complete human organism that is now you, the reader, was once an adolescent and before that an infant. Were you once an embryo? If Silver’s view is correct, the answer is “no.” But the truth is that the answer is “yes” — you were once an embryo, just as you were once an adolescent, a child, an infant, and a fetus. The human organism that is now you is the very same organism that began in the embryonic stage and developed by a gradual and gapless process of self-directed growth to the mature stage of a human being. By contrast, you were never a sperm cell or an ovum. The sperm cell and ovum whose union brought you into existence were genetically and functionally parts of other, larger organisms — your parents. But the organism — the new and distinct human individual — who was brought into existence by their union is the organism that is now reading these words.

It is the science of human embryology — not the Bible or any other religious text or authority — that tells us that human embryos are indeed what we say they are and what Silver denies that they are, namely, whole, living individuals of the species Homo sapiens. As complete human organisms, and not mere parts of larger organisms, embryos are radically unlike human gametes, somatic cells, organs, tissues, and the like. If provided with adequate nutrition and a suitable environment, and barring accident or disease, a human embryo will, by internally directing its own integral organic functioning, develop himself or herself from the embryonic into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages, and into adulthood with his or her distinctness, unity, and identity fully intact. What happens in successful fertilization or cloning is the production of a new and distinct organism — a complete individual member of the species in the initial (embryonic) stage of its life. None of Lee Silver’s bluster and spin can make that decisive fact disappear.

Ignoring Arguments
The basis of Silver’s denial that human embryos are human beings is his remarkable claim that human embryos are equivalent to human embryonic stem cells. He argues that, since nobody believes that stem cells are human beings, no one should believe that embryos are human beings. But Silver’s premise is not only remarkable, it is indefensible. In a previous posting, we identified the errors in Silver’s attempt to defend it by reference to the possibility of tetraploid complementation. Silver has not made any effort to resuscitate his argument or respond to our refutation. We also observed that if Silver’s remarkable claim were true, other scientists — particularly human embryologists and stem cell scientists with greater expertise than Professor Silver — would confirm it. Why have they not? Silver’s answer is as remarkable as his claim itself. He asserts that scientists know the truth, but they are deliberately hiding it from the public for fear that if it were revealed people would demand new restrictions on stem-cell research. There is no polite way to say this: Professor Silver’s suggestion that there is a massive scientific deception or cover up is ridiculous.

Equally ridiculous, and grossly hypocritical, is Silver’s claim that we hold a position that is not amenable to debate. This series of exchanges with Professor Silver began when (in an article in Science and Technology News and in his book Challenging Nature) he accused us of basing our position that human embryos are human beings on a “hidden theology.” Silver claimed that our argument for this position depended on the proposition that a thing either is or is not a human being. In our October 3 NRO article, we provided a formal (and we believe decisive) refutation of the argument by which Silver proposed to show that we were implicitly relying on theology in our argument for the proposition that a human embryo is a human being; but Silver has provided no answer at all to that refutation. Moreover, in that same article we presented two additional philosophical arguments to support the proposition he claimed we were relying on theology to believe. But he has offered no reply whatsoever to those two arguments.

While consistently failing to engage the counterarguments we have advanced against him, Professor Silver did offer three arguments against the conclusion we draw, namely, that human embryos are living members of the species Homo sapiens — human beings in the embryonic stage of development. In our October 19 NRO article we analyzed each of these arguments and showed that each is unsound. But — like the argument we presented against his original charge of “hidden theology” — these arguments too have received no reply whatsoever. That is, Professor Silver has not even attempted to show that our arguments are defective. Nowhere does he even try to demonstrate that we have relied on a false premise or proceeded on the basis of an invalid inference.

Instead, Silver simply reprises his bald assertion that we hold our belief that human embryos are embryonic human beings on faith “entirely divorced from any connection to modern biological understanding.” Yet, we have presented a wealth of evidence, cited standard and authoritative scientific texts, and invited Silver to identify factual or logical errors in our arguments. Where he has attempted to do so, we have responded by identifying with specificity errors of fact and logic in his critique of our claims. We have offered extended and detailed arguments based on experience, science, and philosophy — at no point appealing to any authority save the authority of reason itself. We deal in the currency of reasons and arguments; Silver replies with name-calling and arm-chair psychoanalysis. But these antics cannot obscure the fact that Silver has simply left our arguments unrebutted. Presumably, if Silver had answers to our points he would supply them. As it is, he is reduced to the shabby tactic of labeling us “fundamentalists” and then — in perhaps the most amusing of his diversions — casting about for some authority to validate the charge. What authority does he come up with? To whom does he appeal as an expert to distinguish true Catholicism from fundamentalism? He invokes the authority of the polemicist blogger Andrew Sullivan. Res ipsa loquitur.

Deceptive Appearances
It also is surprising to find Professor Silver, of all people, responding to the barrage of biological evidence we have adduced, by appealing to appearances (albeit enhanced by extremely sophisticated magnification) in an effort to salvage his position. Of course, the fact that humans in the embryonic stage don’t look like humans at later developmental stages is simply irrelevant to the question whether they are in fact human beings at an early developmental stage. The fact that Joseph Merrick — the “Elephant man” — didn’t look like other human beings did not mean that he was something other than a human being. Yet, those who relied on appearances for their judgments could not grasp his humanity, prompting him to exclaim: “I am not an animal. I am a human being. I am a man.” Indeed, he was. By the same token, the fact that an embryo looks like certain non-embryonic clumps of cells does not mean that it is the same thing as a non-embryonic growth or cellular system or a collection of stem cells. To suppose otherwise is to imagine that a sleeping human being or a human being in a temporary or long-term coma is the same thing as a corpse, or that fool’s gold is gold, since they can appear to be identical before inquiry establishes that the sleeping or comatose human is alive and that the fool’s gold is actually pyrite.

But no one has ever asserted that embryos and certain non-embryonic entities or collections of cells are always visually distinguishable or that they are different kinds of things only if they are visually distinguishable. Everyone in this debate knows, and has assumed all along, that embryos at very early stages of their development and certain non-embryonic entities or collections of cells can look alike. Our proposition, fully supported by the standard authorities in human embryology (more on that in a moment), is that scientific inquiry — by observation of their manner of behavior and by genetic and epigenetic analysis — can distinguish them as radically different kinds of things.

Of course, we are assuming — on Professor Silver’s word — that what one of the two micrographs depicts is, in fact, not an embryo but a collection of stem cells. We further assume (for otherwise the case would not be interesting or constitute any sort of challenge) that what he describes as a “bunch of embryonic stem cells” is not, in fact, totipotent — that is, the cells do not constitute a complete, functioning human organism that, if provided with a suitable environment, will by an internally directed process develop itself towards the mature stage of a human individual. If what he describes as a “bunch of embryonic stem cells” were, in fact, a complete, functioning human organism generated asexually by, for example, some method of aggregating and manipulating stem cells, then it would be indistinguishable from an embryo for the simple reason that it is one — in the same way that a cloned human embryo is an embryo.

So, assuming that Professor Silver is accurately and fully describing the two micrographs and is not simply begging the question by offering depictions of two embryos generated by different means, then one micrograph depicts a developing human individual in the earliest stage of his or her natural development — an embryo — and the other depicts a collection of cells that merely visually resembles a developing human in the embryonic stage. Science here, as it does in so many other cases, shows that — and where — appearances and reality part ways. Application of scientific methods would enable a competent and properly equipped embryologist/teratologist to distinguish an actual embryo from a non-embryonic growth or cellular mass which merely visually resembles it.

But Professor Silver makes a further assertion. He claims, not just that the two look alike, but that, “Even if you could look inside with the finest microscope, it almost certainly wouldn’t help because there is almost certainly no molecule, or combination of molecules, whose presence or absence distinguishes all human embryos from embryonic stem cells.” But Professor is merely repeating a scientific error that we refuted in our October 19 article. If a group of stem cells is placed within the normal environment for the gestation of an embryo — a receptive uterus — they do not develop themselves toward maturity. By contrast, if a human embryo is placed within a receptive uterus it will internally coordinate several changes within itself to develop itself to the mature stage of a human organism. That means that the two (the group of stem cells vs. the human embryo) do differ in molecular arrangement, patterns of gene expression, and in one or more cytoplasmic factors. It is precisely these differences that are critically required for (and constitute corroborating evidence of) the radically different developmental trajectories of the two groups of cells (only one of which shows itself to be a unitary organism).

Consulting the Authorities
Next, Professor Silver says: “In fact, none of the standard texts you’ve quoted — or any other prominent biology textbook used at major nonsectarian universities — actually states that an ‘embryo’ is a ‘human being.’” In all of our writings on the embryo question we have made it clear — indeed, we have repeatedly, explicitly stated — that by “human being” we mean a whole member of the human species (at any stage of his or her development), or complete human organism (though perhaps at an immature stage). And it is a simple fact that the texts we quoted do teach that human embryos are whole living members of the species Homo sapiens and complete human organisms at the earliest stage of their development. Indeed, these texts identify the coming to be of the human organism — the human individual — with the coming to be of the zygote. Speaking of the zygote formed at fertilization, Keith Moore and T.V. N. Persaud say: “This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual” (p.16, emphasis supplied). Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller say that, at fertilization, “under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte” (p. 8, emphasis supplied). And William Larsen says that the gametes “unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual” (p.1). (Of course, that individual is not an individual spider or goat. Larsen is talking about a human individual. And he is not talking about a mere part of a human individual, like a bit of human tissue or a fingernail or liver. He is talking about a whole, albeit developmentally immature, human individual, viz., a human being.) Bruce Carlson, a distinguished professor of human embryology at the University of Michigan Michigan (a “non-sectarian university,” let us assure Professor Silver, since that kind of thing seems to matter so much to him) and author of a leading text, recently testified under oath as an expert witness in embryology in a case now pending. There he stated explicitly that human embryos are human beings: “the human being is created immediately after fertilization, and the maturation process and growth is a seamless continuum.” Can Professor Silver identify a human embryologist of the stature of Professor Carlson who is prepared to go under oath to contradict him?

In our October 3 NRO article, we began by speaking of “human beings in the embryonic stage of development.” In this same paragraph we said: “The complete human organism — the whole living member of the species Homo sapiens — that is, for example, you the reader, is the same human individual that at an earlier point in his or her life was an adolescent, a child, an infant, a fetus, an embryo.” This is precisely the teaching of Moore and Persaud, O’Rahilly and Mueller, Larsen, Carlson, and other leading human embryologists.

Keeping to the Scientific Question
We have also made it clear that the evaluative question of whether every human individual is a subject of rights is a distinct question from that of whether every human embryo is a human individual. Some philosophers have argued that not all human individuals, or human beings, are persons, and we have presented philosophical arguments to show why that position is mistaken. However, some people use the term “human being” as expressing an evaluative concept, synonymous with “person,” rather than as expressing a biological concept, synonymous with “human individual” or “whole member of the human species.” When Silver says that none of the texts we cited say that human embryos are human beings (or when he challenges us to find one of his Princeton biology colleagues who says that embryos are human beings) he is trading on this linguistic ambiguity and the understandable desire of scientific writers to steer clear of ethical or evaluative questions in describing facts.

But we have made clear that by “human being” we mean the biological reality of a whole, living individual of the human species. And on this the embryology textbook writers are perfectly in line with our view and offer Silver no support at all. The simple question of fact with respect to what the standard embryology texts say is whether they do or do not agree that human embryos, from the zygote stage on, are whole human organisms — whole (though immature) members of the human species. An examination of the short quotations given above, and the longer ones provided in our October 19 NRO article, shows that the standard embryology texts do unequivocally affirm that human embryos are whole human individuals, complete human organisms, individual members of the human species, “human beings” precisely as we have defined the term in our writings. It is what Robert Edwards meant when — speaking of the newly conceived Louise Brown — he straightforwardly and accurately described her as a “microscopic human being.” Writing years after her birth, he noted that the human individual that was by then scampering through the schoolyard was the very same human individual that he had observed in the petri dish: “She was beautiful then,” Edwards declared, “and she is beautiful now.” That embryo was not some pre-human creature that only later became Louise Brown. That was the embryonic Louise Brown — the same individual, the human being — who would a few years later scamper through the schoolyard.

Of course, we have also taken note of the fact that some supporters of abortion and embryo-destructive research acknowledge that human embryos are human beings, but deny that they are “persons,” i.e., individuals possessing inherent dignity and a right to life. Such people typically claim that human beings acquire dignity and rights only after coming into being (if they acquire them at all) and may cease possessing dignity and rights prior to dying. They maintain that some humans (embryos, fetuses, even infants) are not yet persons; others (human beings in permanent comas or those suffering from advanced dementias) are no longer persons; and still others (severely retarded individuals) were never, are not, and never will be persons. They identify “personhood” with possession of the immediately exercisable capacity for a certain level of cognitive functioning. So we have separately argued for the further proposition that every human being, irrespective of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency possesses inherent dignity and a right to life. The question whether all, or only some, human beings are “persons” is a philosophical one. In this respect, it is unlike the biological question of whether human embryos are human beings. So the arguments we (and others) advance in support of the proposition that all human beings are persons are philosophical, rather than biological, arguments. Even here, though, we do not appeal to religious faith or authority.

Changing His Mind
This takes us to Professor Silver’s attempt to use Dr. Leon Kass as an authority against our view. Silver rightly emphasizes Kass’s standing as an accomplished scholar in bioethics who holds both a medical degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard in biochemistry. He notes that Kass is the former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics and that one of us (Robert George) serves with him on the Council. Silver then quotes Kass as writing, “I myself would agree that a blastocyst [an embryo that is 4 to 9 days post-fertilization] is not, in a full sense, a human being.” Then Silver tauntingly goes in for what he thinks is the kill: “I assume, Professor George, that you’ve had many chances to persuade Professor Kass with your ‘careful argumentation and the relevant biological facts,” and (as far as I can tell), you haven’t succeeded.”

Well, let’s see about that.

We’re delighted that Professor Silver has chosen to bring Leon Kass into this discussion as an authority on the issue in dispute. Kass is a giant among bioethicists and a person whose knowledge of the relevant science is beyond dispute. Moreover, he is a scholar of the highest intellectual integrity: a man who carefully weighs facts and follows arguments wherever they lead — even when the conclusion they generate requires him to revise his position. The quotation Silver is trying to use against us is from an essay written by Kass 28 years ago and reprinted in his 1985 collection entitled Toward a More Natural Science. What Silver does not reveal — we hope it was because he was not aware of it, although that would be odd — is that when Kass republished the essay in 2002 (after his appointment as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics) in his widely distributed and much discussed book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity, he added the following sentence to the relevant paragraph: “One could go even further: the in vitro blastocyst is exactly what a human being is at that stage of human development. Only its extracorporeal location is different.”

On the crucial question of biological fact in this dispute, then, Kass turns out to be a witness for our position and against Silver’s. Even more embarrassingly for Professor Silver in view of his taunting claim that George had failed “to persuade Professor Kass with your ‘careful argumentation and the relevant biological facts,’” Kass has explained his reason for revising his text to include an affirmation of the humanity of the embryo. Writing to George, he said that the reason was “precisely because you persuaded me that my earlier formulation [that is, the one quoted so triumphantly by Silver] was inadequate.” Kass’s difference with us — a narrow but important one — is not on the science at all, but rather on the difficult philosophical question. Even here, though, his position is far closer to ours than to Silver’s. Unlike Silver, he believes that human embryos have a high moral status and deserve respect far above what is owed to stem cells, gametes, organs, fingernails, etc. And although he does not regard human beings in the embryonic stage as having moral status equal to that of newborns, he concedes that the question is indeed difficult, that important philosophical arguments for the opposing position have been made, and that he has less than complete confidence in his own position. For that reason, he has firmly, consistently, and publicly taken the view that we should not treat any stage of nascent human life — which, he holds, at all stages should elicit awe and respect — less well than it might deserve.

There is another bioethicist well known to Professor Silver who disagrees with us far more radically on the philosophical question but has asserted with respect to the biological question the very position we hold and Silver denies. In his book Writings on an Ethical Life, published in 2000, Peter Singer stated that the proposition that a human embryo is, as a matter of biological fact, a human being is not only true, but beyond doubt:

It is possible to give “human being” a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to “member of the species Homo sapiens.” Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense, there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and egg is a human being. (emphasis supplied)

Now we don’t know whether Singer continues to hold this view, though the scientific evidence in its support has only strengthened in the six years since he stated it with such certitude. (On the respects in which the evidence has grown even stronger, see Helen Pearson, “Developmental Biology: Your Destiny from Day One,” Nature, Vol. 418, Issue 6893, 2002. Nature, Professor Silver can be assured, is a “non-sectarian” scientific journal.) For purposes of our debate with Professor Silver, it doesn’t matter. For Professor Singer was then, as he is now, an atheist. He, like Silver, supports embryo-destructive research and abortion; indeed, he even goes so far as to say that infanticide can be morally justified. Unlike Silver, however, he is willing frankly to acknowledge the truth about these practices: they involve the deliberate killing of human beings. They are, to use the words of another candid supporter of abortion and embryo-destructive research, legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, “choices for death.”

Conclusion
Let us conclude with a reply to Professor Silver’s allegation that we fail to identify a test by which our central claim about the embryo’s status as a complete and distinct organism can be verified or falsified. The test of whether a group of cells constitutes a single organism is whether they form a stable body and function as parts of a whole, self-developing, adaptive unit. Contrary to Professor Silver’s supposition, this test is clearly passed by a human embryo, and clearly failed by a group of stem cells. As we noted, if a human embryo is placed within its normal environment, namely, a receptive human uterus, then (barring accidents or disease) it will actively develop itself by a coordinated series of self-directed changes to the mature stage of a human organism. By contrast, if a group of stem cells is placed within a receptive uterus, this does not occur. The test of whether it is a whole (though immature) human organism is whether the direction of its growth (if it has one) is toward the mature stage of that type of organism. The human embryo clearly passes that test, but the group of stem cells fails it.

An embryo and a stem cell are not the same thing, any more than an adult human and a liver or stomach is the same thing. The embryo, like the adult, is a self-integrating whole, a complete member of the species at a certain developmental stage. The stem cell, like the liver, is merely a part. The human embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult differ not as to what they intrinsically are — they are human beings — but in respect of their age, size, stage of development, and condition of dependency.

Once that biological truth is firmly in view, one can then shift to the key ethical question: Do human beings possess inherent and equal dignity? Or does the dignity of a human being depend upon or vary with his or her age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency? Our view, which we have defended in various writings, is that the dignity of human beings is inherent and that all of us, as members of the human family, are created equal.

— Patrick Lee is professor of bioethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

Lee's and George's second response

source

October 19, 2006 8:39 AM

Silver Lining
A reply to Lee Silver.

By Patrick Lee & Robert P. George

We thank Professor Silver for his response . On the basis of this exchange, we are confident that readers will be able to judge whether Professor Silver’s claim that human embryos are something other than what we say they are, namely, human beings in the earliest stage of their natural development, can withstand scrutiny in light of the findings of modern embryological science.

Are Human Embryos Human Beings?
Silver claims that while many people believe that human embryos are human beings, what sets us apart is that we contend that this is a matter of scientific fact, rather than a proposition of faith. But we are scarcely set apart by this claim. On the contrary, our claim that the human being that is, say, you the reader, is the same determinate and enduring being — the same individual member of the species Homo sapiens — who at an earlier stage of his or her life was an adolescent, a child, an infant, a fetus, and an embryo, is a fact confirmed by contemporary embryology and attested to by the standard works in the field. (We mentioned several of these works in the essay to which Silver responds; he cites none in support of his position.) Terms such as human “adolescent,” “infant,” and “embryo” do not refer to beings of distinct kinds; rather, they refer to the same kind of being — a human being, an individual member of the species Homo sapiens — at different developmental stages. You were once an embryo, just as surely as you were once an adolescent, and before that a child. So that readers will be left in no doubt, let us quote a couple of the standard texts. Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, in The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, perhaps the most widely used of the embryology texts, make the following unambiguous statement about the beginning of a new and distinct human individual: “Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell — a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual” (p.16, emphasis supplied). Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, in their book Human Embryology and Teratology, say this: “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte” (p. 8, emphasis supplied).

An even weaker point advanced by Silver is his complaint that we “have not budged” in our rejection of Ronald Bailey’s claim that embryos are analogous to skin cells or other somatic cells that can be used (it is assumed) in human cloning. People who recall our exchanges with Bailey on NRO know that our rejection of his proposed analogy has nothing to do with stubbornness. Rather, we showed by careful argumentation and the presentation of the relevant biological facts that somatic cells are analogous not to embryos — which are complete self-integrating organisms that are, as the standard scientific texts attest, new individuals of their species — but rather to gametes (sperm and egg) whose union can bring into existence a new and distinct individual in the embryonic stage of its development.

Parts and Wholes
Let us turn now to two key propositions in our argument that human embryos are human beings. Silver disputes these propositions. We said that human embryos are (embryonic) human beings because they are complete human organisms that “have an internal active disposition toward the mature stage of a human being.” Silver disputes this proposition. He claims that “we know that a single cell can separate from a 4- cell embryo and develop into a separate human baby (on rare natural occasions).” According to him, “Lee and George would argue that this cell has the ‘internal active disposition’ that makes it a human being.” But this would be inconsistent with our position that ES cells are not human beings because they lack such an active disposition to develop to maturity.

Silver here commits the error of confusing a part with a whole. When the cell is part of the whole multi-cellular organism, it lacks any disposition to develop on its own: for, if it is not split off, then it will continue to act in coordination with other cells along a trajectory toward the mature stage of development of the organism of which it is a part. If the splitting of the cell from the whole embryo results in a new embryo, this is a form of asexual reproduction, and an example of what evidently occurs in normal monozygotic twinning. So the fact that a single cell could be separated from a four-celled embryo and produce a second embryo is completely consistent with our position that embryonic-stem (ES) cells are not human beings because they lack this internal active disposition.

Developmental Trajectories
Silver then claims that “an internal active disposition” “is not a term that has any meaning in the context of cellular or molecular biology.” But this is mere bluster. The concept of a disposition or tendency is scarcely foreign to scientific contexts, where one speaks, for example, of the solubility of salt (sodium chloride) or of sugar (sucrose) and their variance in relation to temperature; for, solubility is a disposition, a tendency to do something in a given context. We added “internal” and “active” to distinguish it clearly from the (merely passive) capacity of something to be changed by being acted upon by an extrinsic agent. Thus, when biology books refer to the capacity for metabolism as being one of the marks of a living system, “capacity” refers to the same sort of thing we were referring to by the term “internal active disposition.” We could also have used the term “developmental trajectory” or “developmental program” to make the same point. An organism with a single developmental trajectory toward the mature stage of a human being is already a human being.

Moreover, dispositions or developmental trajectories in organisms have structural bases; that is, present in the organism are constituents and arrangements (organization) responsible for the active disposition or developmental trajectory. So, when Silver next claims, “If George and Lee want to claim otherwise [namely, that “internal active disposition” does have a meaning in the context of cellular and molecular biology] I’d like to know their perception of the molecular attributes that distinguish human being-cells from non-human-being, yet still fully viable and human cells” — we are happy to inform him. At the one-cell stage, comparing a zygote to, say, a stem cell, the one-celled embryo differs epigenetically from the stem cell (that is, while each has the complete genome there are differences in the activation or silencing of various genes).

But that is not all, for there are also differences with respect to several cytoplasmic factors. The embryo is such that, unlike a stem cell or any other somatic cell, its whole developmental program, both the epigenetic state of its DNA and various proteins and RNA factors in its cytoplasm (differences that are fully discernable at the molecular level) enable it to develop along a trajectory towards developmental maturity. At later stages of development, each of the cells of the embryo will differ from a separated stem cell or from other somatic cells — among other ways — in being modified by interaction with other cells within the embryo in such a manner as to contribute to homeostasis and the development of the organism as a whole. Therefore, “in the context of cellular and molecular biology,” a single-cell human being (i.e. a zygote) is distinct from any other viable human cell in terms of 1) its epigenetic state, 2) its pattern of gene activation, 3) its molecular composition, and 4) its subsequent pattern of development — all of which can be (and indeed are) easily determined by scientists without recourse to crystal balls, sacred texts, or articles of faith.

Are Embryonic Stem Cells Human Beings?
In an astonishingly misleading paragraph, Silver quotes from a quick summary given by a reporter from Science magazine about a meeting of scientists working on gene knockouts (a procedure in which, by a complicated process, a gene is deactivated — “knocked out” — in a mouse in order to discover what that gene’s normal function would be). Suspecting something fishy, we took the trouble to look. The scientists were examining how they could cooperate more effectively on an international level. In the past they had shared research data and materials in part by shipping mice that had been engineered with a certain gene knockout. Silver quotes the reporter summarizing their discussion as follows: “the participants agreed that it would be most economical to avoid trafficking in live mice and instead decided to maintain the knockouts as embryonic stem (ES) cells: clumps of tissue that can be frozen down and later grown up into full-fledged mice.” Professor Silver takes this as evidence that “[t]hose…who have worked only with early-stage mouse embryos” are more honest than scientists who work on human stem cells when speaking “about the relationship of embryos to stem cells.” In other words, Silver presents this quote as proof from authority that stem cells really are the moral equivalent of embryos (because they can somehow “by themselves” grow into embryos).

However, first, it is clear that the reporter is merely trying to summarize quickly the conclusions of a long meeting of stem-cell scientists; he is not attempting to select his words with exactitude, and much less is he addressing the issue in dispute between Professor Silver and ourselves. Silver is making much out of what is manifestly nothing more than a reporter’s shorthand manner of speaking. The article from Science is available online. We urge readers who are evaluating Silver’s arguments against our own to examine this article for themselves.

Moreover — and much more significantly — Silver fails to mention that the knockout procedure involves first knocking out a specific gene in mouse stem cells, then injecting those stem cells into an early mouse embryo, where the manipulated stem cells will be randomly incorporated into the body of the developing embryo. In some of the chimeric mice formed in this manner, the stem cells will contribute to the gonads, and therefore the germ cells produced by the mature animal will also lack the gene that was eliminated from the stem cells. In this case, by “back crossing” such “germ line deficient” mice (i.e., inter-breeding the male and female offspring of the mouse carrying the gene deletion), ultimately a mouse is produced that lacks the knocked out gene in all the cells of its body, and the phenotype that results from the loss of that gene’s action can be determined. The point the scientists were making was simply that it would be more economical and efficient to ship to other sites the manipulated stem cells rather than the mice with the gene knockouts, largely because many such knock-out mice are quite unhealthy, and therefore they are difficult to breed and expensive to maintain. When the scientists described the ES cells (or, more precisely, when the reporter recounted them as describing the ES cells as) “clumps of tissue that can be frozen down and later grown up into full-fledged mice,” it was understood — as part of the knockout procedure — that this later “growing up” process would involve injecting those ES cells into mouse embryos. Silver’s selective editing makes it appear that these scientists are asserting something they did not assert, and are speaking to an issue they did not address.

Professor Silver had argued in his book that aggregating mouse stem cells with mouse tetraploid embryos allowed the stem cells to develop “by themselves” into mature mice. We pointed out that the aggregation of the stem cells with tetraploid embryos (or embryo-like entities) does more than release an inner capacity in the stem cells. In fact, it generates a new and distinct organism, just as combining the nucleus of a somatic cell with an enucleated ovum (as in cloning) generates a new organism — in both cases, an embryonic member of the mouse (or other) species in question. In his reply, Silver now says the following:

Furthermore, as I wrote in my book, human ES cells have already been differentiated into placenta. This means that, in theory, the requirement for a second source of cells to reconstitute an embryo may be nullified, and ES cells — all by their lonesome — could develop into a fetus and human baby. This discussion was conveniently left out of Lee and George's review.

This is supposed to show that stem cells really are equivalent to embryos because they can “by themselves,” or “all by their lonesome,” develop into mature members of their species. However, this argument is dubious at best, given that there is no evidence that an embryo could be generated by recombining ES-cells that have been “differentiated into placenta” with an undifferentiated ES cell, and there is sound scientific evidence to suggest embryos cannot be generated in this manner. In fact, the second article Silver cites in his book on this subject is much more cautious in its conclusions than Silver himself is. The authors write;

The human equivalent to trophoblast stem cells has not yet been derived, and it is likely that different growth factors will be required for their propagation.[note omitted] Although, in our current studies, BMP4 efficiently induced differentiation of human ES cells to trophoblast, these trophoblast cells propagated poorly, even in the continued presence of bFGF and fibroblast feeder layers (data not shown), suggesting that additional growth factors are required for their long-term proliferation. (Ren-He Xu, et al., “BMP4 initiates human embryonic stem cell differentiation to trophoblast,” Nature Bioetechnology 20 (December 2002), 1261-1264, at 1263)

Moreover, as partly recounted in Silver’s book, and more fully in the scholarly articles to which Silver refers, the stem cells (in the experiment Silver cites) by no means develop into embryos and fetuses without extrinsic causes in the form of external manipulations. No one denies or has denied that one can manipulate factors found in early stem cells and combined those factors with stem cells in such a way as to generate a new embryo. But just as combining factors from an ovum and a somatic cell to generate a new individual member of a species in the embryonic stage does not show that an ovum or a somatic cell used in the process was somehow already an embryo or its equivalent, the combining and manipulating of factors found in early stem cells does not show that a stem cell is an embryo or its equivalent. The fact that one can combine A (a stem cell) with B (another cell that is produced by a significant manipulation of a stem cell) to produce C, does not in the least prove that A or B were identical with C all along.

A Thing Either Is or Is Not a Human Being
The second proposition of ours that Silver contests, is that a thing either is or is not a human being, that is, that each human being came to be at once, not gradually. Readers will recall that our view is entirely consistent with the biological fact that fertilization is a process. Our point is that a new human being does not “partially” exist as the process unfolds. Rather, a new human being is what the process, if it reaches completion, brings into existence. (If fertilization fails, it is not correct to say that a “partial” human was brought into being, or that a human was “partially” brought into being.) Silver notes that we provided several arguments defending our position, but mentions only one, namely, in his words, “that it is simply commonsensical to most people.” He then notes that common sense is often mistaken, as “many examples from science demonstrate.”

Here again, however, what Silver says is highly misleading. First, in Silver’s article in Science and Theology News, he did not just claim that we presuppose the proposition that a being either is a human being or is not; rather, he claimed that it was a “hidden theological premise.” He even went so far as to allege — preposterously — that we adopted this premise from a literal interpretation of Genesis, according to which humans are made in God’s image, and God is absolute, so just as there cannot be a partial God, so there cannot be a partial human. His charge was that we were covertly injecting our “fundamentalist” Christian beliefs into secular-sounding arguments.

Of course, we pointed out that the inference we supposedly made starting from a teaching in Genesis was patently fallacious (i.e., God cannot be partial, humans are made in God’s image, therefore there cannot be partial humans — by the same reasoning one could infer that we must be omniscient, eternal, perfect, and so on). We then pointed out that the idea that human beings come to be at once was part of common sense; the point was to show (along with other arguments) that it was not a premise we had to take from the Bible or Church teaching: Since it is a commonsense idea, it is absurd to suppose that all those who make use of it are covertly smuggling in a literal reading of Genesis. Further, we made a point of stating expressly that just because this idea is part of common sense “doesn’t by itself prove it, but does provide support for it.”

After having given four reasons showing that no one has to appeal, openly or covertly, to revelation in order to hold this position (that something either is or is not a human being), we then moved on to a different task, namely, providing philosophical support for this position. We presented two distinct philosophical arguments. Silver offers no reply at all to either of these arguments. His only attack, and that a weak one, is on the single argument that we expressly said “doesn’t by itself prove” the position we were defending, but merely “provides support for it.”

In his book and article, Silver claims that the assumption that a thing either is or is not some kind of thing must be a hidden theological premise. But he now admits that it might have been adopted from common sense. Moreover, he now even admits that “[i]t is not surprising that so many philosophers have also held this position,” though he adds that, “[t]wo millennia ago, in the absence of modern scientific knowledge and biomedical technology, Aristotle would certainly have convinced me of its veracity.” Thus, Silver has implicitly abandoned the claim that this view depends on covert “fundamentalist” theological premises. But Silver’s attempt to discredit this view by tying it to a philosophical approach that has allegedly been falsified by modern science is equally misleading. First, he ignores the fact that we cited (to show, earlier, that this position was not a hidden theological premise) contemporary as well as ancient philosophers. (We specifically mentioned David Wiggins, Roderick Chisholm, Peter Van Inwagen, and E.J. Lowe, all recent or contemporary analytic philosophers.) Moreover — even if one disagrees with them — no one is likely to accuse any of them of naively following an outmoded, two millennia-old philosophical approach. Further, neither of the two philosophical arguments we presented to defend the proposition at the heart of the debate — arguments ignored by Silver — were lifted from ancient sources.

Daunted by Darwin?
Silver does present an argument against our position that a human being either is or is not — i.e., that there is no entity that is somehow between a human being and a non-human creature. Here is his argument:

The most serious challenge, of course, came from Darwin, whose theory of natural selection suggests that in the evolution of pre-human apes into human beings, there was no first human being. Instead, there appears to have been a continuum of evolutionary forms in a process during which no child was significantly different from its parents. The scientific implication is that some "things" might be in-between non-human and human.

But this argument is fallacious. Darwin proposes at least a partial explanation of the emergence of new species (whether it is a sufficient or complete explanation is another question, which we need not settle here). The idea is that some species evolved from other species, and that the human species evolved from lower animal species, at least with respect to the organic aspect of the human being (whether that is all there is to human nature is another question, which, again, we need not settle in the context of the current debate). But this does not show that there must have been some creatures which were in between humans and non-humans — creatures that were neither human nor non-human. It only shows that certain non-human animals evolved gradually (or perhaps not so gradually — the point is disputed among evolutionary biologists) to become more and more like humans until, at least partly through genetic mutations, the human species (as a distinct and identifiable species) emerged. Nothing in the Darwinian account suggests that there is or was a species that was neither human nor non-human — a species that was “in between” human and non-human.

In other words, if species B evolved from species A though an accumulation of minute genetic changes, that does nothing to show that the last entity just before the last genetic change which (wholly or in part) produced the new species B, must have been something that was partially B. Rather, that last entity prior to B was a non-B that was in a great many respects like a B.

Moreover, the addition of a minute genetic change could be — whether wholly or in part — responsible for a radical change in the properties possessed by a new being. It is entirely possible that an accumulation of minute changes to a system could together give rise to entirely new, emergent properties. There are numerous examples in the field of biology where minute changes in a gene (even the alteration of a single nucleotide) radically alter what the gene does, either completely eliminating its function (null mutations) or producing an entirely new function for the same DNA sequence (neomorphic mutations). In such cases, well-understood molecular events (i.e., DNA mutations) can give rise to emergent properties at the level of whole organisms. Small changes in the timing of key developmental events or in the structural organization of the brain could also produce radical differences in morphology or neurological function between closely related species. In other words, Darwin’s theory asserts that humans are descended from non-human animal species; Darwin’s theory does not say that those non-humans were or could in some way have been “partial” humans.

Embryos and Disorganized Growths
Next, Silver presents what he calls “another scientific challenge for Lee and George”: “If a perfectly normal human embryo is grown in a laboratory incubator, it can develop without any discontinuity into a teratoma.” We (Lee and George) would have to hold, he says, that during its first week in a petri dish, it is a human being. “But no one believes that an embryo-generated teratoma is a human being, even though it can be kept alive as a unique, integrated organism.” And this presents us with the problem: “So when during the continuous life of this organism did the human being suddenly disappear?”

Here Silver’s claims are deeply confused, as standard works of teratology, like the one we cited by O’Rahilly and Mueller, make clear. Even granting — for the sake of argument — that Silver has described the phenomenon accurately, there simply are no valid grounds for regarding — as Silver does — a teratoma as a unitary functioning organism, as opposed to a disorganized growth. Teratomas (unlike embryos) are not individuals of the species in the earliest stage of their development towards organismal maturity. Rather, teratomas are masses of cells, often containing some degree of sub-organismal order or organization (for example, hair, teeth, limb primordia), but lacking organismal wholeness, or indeed any unitary order at the level of a whole organism.

Embryos do not, however, by normal development, turn into teratomas. A “perfectly normal human embryo” cannot “turn into” a teratoma without an intervening event — the death of the embryo — that causes a radical discontinuity between the two. An embryo that dies, leaving physical remains in the form of a teratoma, is a distinct case from an embryo that develops to the fetal stage. Embryos literally turn into fetuses, just as adolescents turn into adults. There is no discontinuity; merely normal development. That is why we cannot say of an embryo and a teratoma what we can say of an embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult, namely, that they are the same entity or being at different developmental stages.

Silver’s argument is an effort to make something of the fact that an event may occur that irreversibly destroys an embryo’s capacity for self-organization and internally-driven growth in the direction of developmental maturity, leaving only a disorganized mass — a teratoma. If this happens, a tumor-like structure lacking the organization and capacity for self-directed development towards maturity as a member of the species is the physical remains of what was, before its death, a complete organism — a living member of the species in the embryonic stage. The teratoma is not continuous with the embryo, since a radical discontinuity — embryonic death — has occurred.

To simply return Silver’s challenge in a somewhat more familiar context; when a patient in a hospital dies, would Silver assert that “a perfectly normal human” develops “without any discontinuity” into a corpse? If a meaningful distinction between a patient and a corpse cannot be drawn (as Silver’s analysis seems to suggest) because the transition between the two states is “continuous,” are we required to view living and dead human bodies as the same, simply because the former seamlessly gives rise to the latter? This is, of course, absurd. Medical science routinely addresses the question of when a patient passes from life to death and medical research into this question continues to define the molecular and cellular correlates of death with greater and greater accuracy. The question of “when during the continuous life of this organism did the human being cease to exist?” can (and is) readily addressed by medical research, and does not present a significant intellectual or scientific challenge to our position.

Spontaneous Embryo Loss — What is Lost?
At the end of Silver’s reply there is a serious mischaracterization or misunderstanding of our position that must be corrected. Silver, and others, had argued that human embryos are not worthy of the full moral respect due to a human being because a high percentage of embryos formed in natural pregnancies fail to implant or spontaneously abort. To this we have at times presented, as a preliminary note to a detailed argument, the following point: “It is worth noting first, as the standard embryology texts point out, that many of these unsuccessful pregnancies are really due to incomplete fertilizations. So in many cases, what is lost is not actually a human embryo” (from Robert George’s Personal Statement in the Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, on Human Cloning and Human Dignity, p.305).

In both his book and his reply on NRO, Silver misunderstands this to mean that we hold that all defects in fertilization — that is, malfunctions of various sorts in the fertilization process — result in entities that lack the active disposition to, or the developmental trajectory toward, the mature stage of a human being, and so are not actually human embryos. But after making the above point in his personal statement in the Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics on cloning, George went on to say:

“To be a complete human organism (a human being), the entity must have the epigenetic primordia for a functioning brain and nervous system, though a chromosomal defect might only prevent development to maximum functioning (in which case it would be a human being, though handicapped) (emphasis added). If fertilization is not complete, then what is developing is not an organism with the active capacity to develop itself to the mature (even if handicapped) state of a human.”

So our point has always been only that in some instances of “defective fertilizations” what results will lack the program for or developmental trajectory toward the mature stage of a human being, and so is not a human embryo. An embryonic human may certainly have the basic program or disposition orienting it toward the mature stage, but also have defects that prevent the full actualization of that program, as is the case with trisomy 21 and anencephalic infants.

Moreover, in his book Silver presents this merely preliminary note as if it were our main reply to the objection about so-called “embryo-wastage.” Our main replies to that argument, however, have always been that, first, the objection is simply a non sequitur, in fact a form of the naturalistic fallacy — that because something does occur in “nature” with predictable frequency then it must be morally acceptable when deliberately caused by human agency. Second, we have observed that historically, and in some places even today, the infant mortality rate has been very high, and so if this objection were sound, it would show that infanticide in such cultures would be morally acceptable, which (we hope Professor Silver would agree) is absurd.

Put us to the Test
Finally, at both the beginning and the end of his article (and in his book) Professor Silver claims that we have presented a position — that a human embryo is a human being — that is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable (that we cannot conceive of an experiment that would falsify it). We had rebutted objections that monozygotic twinning or formation of chimeras proves that a human individual does not begin at fertilization by pointing out that the conclusion simply does not follow: If monozygotic twinning occurs, evidently a new individual comes to be with the splitting of the original embryo; or, if two embryos combine to form a chimera, evidently either one absorbs the cells of the other or the two cease to be in the formation of a new multi-cellular organism. In his book, Silver labels our reply a “rationalization” and triumphantly claims, “Indeed, they have never described a test that could falsify the theory, which is why this is a matter of faith, not science.”

But again Professor Silver has gone off the rails. The test of whether a group of cells constitutes a single organism is empirically verifiable or falsifiable: that test is whether the cells form a stable body and function as parts of a whole, self-developing, adaptive unit. Again, one need only consult the standard texts. There is no scientific debate about this. It is certainly not a theological dogma or a merely scientific-sounding concept we have concocted. On the contrary, it is the test that has been in general use for years for determining whether an individual (at any developmental stage) remains alive or has died. In the life cycle of embryos that split or combine, there is, indisputably, a whole set of complex, coordinated activities performed by each of these embryos as a whole from day 1 to the day on which twinning or combination occurs (which may be as late as day 9, or, very rarely, even slightly later). This is empirical verification that a developing, single organism exists during that time. So there is a test for verification of the presence or absence of a unitary organism, and we have in our writings applied that test in a straightforward and uncontroversial way to early embryos. Where monozygotic twinning or combination occurs, the embryos prior to those events have clearly passed that test (see Helen Pearson, “Your Destiny, From Day One,” Nature 418 (2002), pp. 14-15). On the other hand, the test also can be failed, and in fact sometime is: In some cases where one thinks there might be a human being at the embryonic stage of development, it turns out that what is present is a teratoma or a complete hydatidiform mole, as evidenced by the lack of self-organization and internally directed growth towards organismal maturity. Thus, the test of whether a unitary organism is present is verifiable or falsifiable. Professor Silver simply ignores the evidence indicating its verification in the coming to be of human embryos at fertilization or monozygotic twinning.

— Patrick Lee is professor of bioethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

Silver's first response

source

October 19, 2006 8:14 AM

Human Issues

To the Editor

I thank my colleagues Patrick Lee and Robert George for the time and effort that they put into reading and critiquing my recently published book, Challenging Nature. Since I present a lengthy discussion of — and challenge to — their previously published views in the first half of my book, I was not surprised that they found much to criticize there. I am disappointed that they had nothing to say about the second half of my book, where I direct my fire at "New Age secularists [who] rail against genetically modified crops." I suspect that many NRO readers will find much to agree with in this portion of my writing (which elicited an enraged review in the American Scientist from the post-modern historian Nathaniel Comfort).

Before I respond to the main points of disagreement, I want readers to know that I wrote about leaders of the Catholic Church in the U.S. with the utmost respect. In describing my meeting with bishops who sit on the Committee on Science and Human Values of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I wrote, “At the outset, I was impressed by their genuine inquisitiveness, their desire to understand the most recent advances in science, and their willingness to admit that important questions existed for which they had no answer.” As I have written, the thrust of my challenge to Lee and George was on scientific grounds, not theological ones.

Professors Lee and George think that human embryos are indisputably human beings. Millions of other people brought up in the Western religious tradition hold the same view, but what sets Lee and George apart is their claim that the “scientific facts” alone prove that human embryos are human beings. Lee and George have read and heard challenges to their claim by scientists, writers, theologians, and other academics. Most notable are the able arguments presented by Ron Bailey in a previous NRO debate. But Lee and George haven’t budged, and I doubt there is anything I can say or write that will ever make them budge. My perception of their attitude should make scientists suspicious because it suggests that Lee and George cannot conceive of an empirical experiment (with results that can be objectively verified) that would falsify their claim. If this is true, their claim is not a scientific one. If they’ve got an experiment, I’d like to hear the operational details.

Lee and George base their embryo-is-a-human-being claim mainly on two propositions. One is that a human embryo has an “internal active disposition for self-directed development toward the mature stage of a human.” Since we know that a single cell can separate from a four-cell embryo and develop into a separate human baby (on rare natural occasions), Lee and George would argue that this cell has the “internal active disposition” that makes it a human being. On the other hand, they argue that isolated embryonic stem (ES) cells are not human beings because they do not have this “internal active disposition.” But “internal active disposition” is not a term that has any meaning in the context of cellular or molecular biology. If George and Lee want to claim otherwise, I’d like to know their perception of the molecular attributes that distinguish human-being cells from non-human-being, yet still fully viable and human, cells.

Those of us who have worked only with early-stage mouse embryos (which are essentially identical in size and appearance to human embryos) don’t have the same qualms as colleagues in the human stem-cell field do when it comes to speaking honestly about the relationship of embryos to stem cells. In the summary of a meeting of mouse geneticists published in the journal Science, the reporter wrote, “the participants agreed that it would be most economical to avoid trafficking in live mice and instead decided to maintain the knockouts as embryonic stem (ES) cells: clumps of tissue that can be frozen down and later grown up into full-fledged mice” (Science 312: 1862-1866; June 30, 2006). Furthermore, as I wrote in my book, human ES cells have already been differentiated into placenta. This means that, in theory, the requirement for a second source of cells to reconstitute an embryo may be nullified, and ES cells — all by their lonesome — could develop into a fetus and human baby. This discussion was conveniently left out of Lee and George’s review. But, if theory becomes practice, and ES cells can be grown directly into a fetus, at what point during continuous development from a bunch of cells to a fetus does a human being instantly appear? Tell me what the molecular correlates are for such an event.

The second proposition that Lee and George use in their appeal to science has been simply stated on many occasions by Professor George: “a thing either is or is not a human being.” Lee and George provide several arguments in support of this proposition. One is that it is simply commonsensical to most people. I have no doubt that this observation is correct, but as many examples from science demonstrate, common sense is no predictor of truth. Furthermore, it is not surprising that so many philosophers have also held this position. Two millennia ago, in the absence of modern scientific knowledge and biomedical technology, Aristotle would certainly have convinced me of its veracity. Modern psychologists have evidence that normal human brains are hard-wired to categorize everything into distinct classes (including human beings and non-human beings).

Scientific knowledge challenges this instinct on many occasions. The most serious challenge, of course, came from Darwin, whose theory of natural selection suggests that in the evolution of pre-human apes into human beings, there was no first human being. Instead, there appears to have been a continuum of evolutionary forms in a process during which no child was significantly different from its parents. The scientific implication is that some “things” might be in-between non-human and human. An alternative suggested by Pope John Paul II is that while physical evolution was continuous, spiritual evolution was not. The pope specifically ruled out an appeal to science when he described this idea.

And here’s another scientific challenge for Lee and George. If a perfectly normal human embryo is grown in a laboratory incubator, it can develop without any discontinuity into a teratoma. According to Lee and George, during the first week in the petri dish, the embryo is a human being. But no one believes that an embryo-generated teratoma is a human being, even though it can be kept alive as a unique, integrated organism, and even though it is certainly not part of any other organism. So when during the continuous life of this organism did the human being suddenly disappear? Again, what molecular or cellular correlates would you expect to see at the moment of passing?

I would like to end this response with the telling of an episode that occurred while I was hiking through the jungle with my two sons and my wife in West Africa last summer. At what one point, my son walked past what looked like an eight-foot long yellow-greenish tree branch that had fallen onto the path. But the “branch” suddenly became animated and slithered off into the undergrowth. It was a snake of the Green Mamba species, our guide told us. “Is it dangerous?,” I asked. “It depends,” he said. “If the snake is able to deposit part of its spirit into the person, it will consume the person’s spirit and death will surely follow. However, if the snake’s spirit doesn’t make it across in the bite, the person will suffer no permanent harm.”

This was not a parable, it was cultural knowledge — an attempt by uneducated people to make sense out of the otherwise unexplainable observation that some people died while others recovered completely after a Green Mamba bite. I didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t disprove it. It failed to provide any predictions — it was not falsifiable and, therefore, it was not scientific.

Professor Lee and George have argued that embryos with wrong numbers of chromosomes are not really embryos because they do not have the capacity to develop into mature human beings. This is true for 90 percent of human embryos which have an extra copy of chromosome 21 (in particular), but ten percent do develop into human beings born with Down Syndrome. In these cases, according to Lee and George, we can tell in retrospect that the embryo must have been a human being as well.

Lee M. Silver
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.

Editor's note: Come back to NRO tomorrow to Robert P. George and Patrick Lee's reply to Lee Silver's letter.